Ratings Breakdown

Key Specs

The DataTraveler Ultimate 3.0 is Kingston's latest USB memory stick and it is also the first USB3.0 flash drive that Windows Middle East has reviewed.

The USB3.0 specification differs from its predecessors on a number of levels including data transfer performance; whereas USB1.1 and 2.0 offer maximum speeds of 12Mbps and 480Mbps, USB3.0 can manage up to 4.8Gbps.

Running our standard benchmarks on the Ultimate, it annihilated every other flash drive we've tested to date, it completed our 1.2GB read and write tests in a hardly believable 19- and 40-seconds respectively. Most USB2.0 flash drives manage to complete these tests with read test times above 35 seconds and write test times well above a minute. Its swift transfer performance also meant we could watch a 720p HD movie stored on the flash drive without any stutters or dropped frames. This is something USB2.0 flash drives just couldn't do.

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At a cost of US $117 or $ 3.66 per gigabyte the Ultimate 3.0 is a pricey flash drive when you consider it offers only 32GB of storage. That said the high cost is likely due to the USB3.0 controller sitting within.

As you'd expect this DataTraveler is also backward compatible with USB2.0 and 1.1 ports and Kingston even supplies a cable and recommends using it when connecting to an older USB2.0 port. We're not quite sure why Kingston has done this however, as the Ultimate functioned perfectly, even when we connected it directly to a USB2.0 port.

Verdict: While the Ultimate 3.0 is expensive it offers lightning quick performance that makes it far more usable than USB2.0 flash drives.